Late bloomer Alicia Hansen mixes it up on Fractography
Over a churning cello line and stately piano chords, a woman is describing a series of very uncomfortable scenes. She and her partner find a pile of sun-bleached bones, cuddle up in the rocking chair where his grandmother died, and then have an awkward moment at the lake. He’s swimming; she’s afraid to dive in, frightened by the unseen but certain presence of leeches.
“Homesickness” sounds like a vacation in hell, but according to singer-pianist Alicia Hansen, it’s more a metaphorical description of her state of mind at the time she made her bleak and brilliant debut, Fractography.
Surprisingly, though, the song’s author hadn’t quite clued in to her own central metaphor. For those who know anything about Hansen’s long and often difficult artistic emergence, it’s clear that she’s the woman in the song, but her plunge has been into captivating depths of sound.
“I’d never thought of it myself, but that makes total sense to me,” she tells the Straight on the line from her Bowen Island home. “That was the big problem. That was the central issue in my life: I knew what it was I had to do, but I just didn’t think that I could do it.”
It’s not that Hansen hadn’t been immersed in music from a very early age. She started formal piano training at four, and took up singing “a couple of years later”. Her vocal skills were strong enough that she eventually landed a coveted position with the Vancouver Chamber Choir, supplementing her income by playing piano on the side. But she wasn’t happy.
“I was making my living doing music.…but I was only about 20 percent musically fulfilled, if that,” she says.
Improvised music eventually offered an escape route: after seeing the Swedish trio e.s.t. at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, she sought out local legend Bob Murphy for piano lessons and signed up for the very well-regarded jazz program at Vancouver Community College.
“I loved it,” she says. “It was really amazing to look at music in such a different way and learn the piano like a new instrument—actually exploring it and learning to do whatever I wanted on it.”
Still, something wasn’t right.
“I knew that I was a pretty lousy jazz pianist,” Hansen admits. “Because I hadn’t grown up with that idiom, it felt totally foreign, and playing standards just felt really awkward and weird and wrong. But I went through playing in a Latin band and a fusion band and doing everything I was supposed to do, and what I ultimately got out of it was the freedom of being allowed to explore and make sounds that I wanted to make.”
Before Hansen reached that place, however, she really did have to go through her own personal hell. Depression, toxic relationships, an eating disorder: there were times, she confides, when making satisfying music appeared to be impossible, and life itself seemed pointless. Just in time, the Canada Council stepped in, and with a grant to make Fractography, Hansen found that she had time to heal and something to say.
The singer and pianist’s debut is anything but easy listening. On it, Hansen draws on her love of contemporary classical music while working with an all-star crew of Vancouver improvisers, including bassist Tommy Babin, drummer Skye Brooks, guitarist Ron Samworth, and cellist Peggy Lee. This makes for dense, thorny, and yet very vital music; bolstered by Hansen’s psychologically fraught lyrics, Fractography’s 11 songs sound like 21st-century lieder, albeit with hints of progressive rock and avant-garde jazz.
Remarkably, though, she’s been able to use her classical-music past without being bound by it. It’s especially gratifying that she’s been able to escape her vocal training; she most definitely does not sound like a soprano singing pop.
“I kind of trashed my voice for a while, and really worked at trying to emulate some of the singers I enjoyed, like PJ Harvey,” Hansen admits. “I did a lot of singing along [to her records], trying to discover where that kind of voice came from.”
Other easy comparisons could be made to Tori Amos, local singer-songwriter Veda Hille, and, on the jazzier side, the little-known but influential singer, pianist, and composer Annette Peacock. That’s not bad company to keep, but what’s really significant is that Hansen is now healthy, physically and psychologically, and making the music she feels she was born to make.
“I love this more than anything I’ve ever done,” she says. “It’s so fulfilling, because I get to play the piano, I get to sing, I get to write the music, I get to write the lyrics. It uses all parts of me at once, and when I’m performing it, there’s no room for anything else in my mind. It’s all-consuming.”
Alicia Hansen plays the Western Front on Friday (January 6), along with Jess Hill and Julie McGeer.
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